David Brooks argues that the view that moral decision-making results from an intuitive, pre-rational engagement with the world, rather than from logical deduction from a set of moral principles, is a challenge to “the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.”
With all respect to David Brooks, this claim, in an otherwise lucid column, strikes me as nonsensical. The new atheists are arguing not against the view that morality is innate, but that it is the product of formal religious teaching. It is the theistic and theocon worldview that is challenged by what Brooks calls the “evolutionary approach to morality,” not the skeptical one. It is the theocons who assert that unless society and individuals are immersed in purported Holy Books, anarchy and depredation will rule the world.
Skeptics respond that moral behavior is instinctual, that parents build on a child’s initial impulses of empathy and fairness and reinforce those impulses with habit and authority. Religious ethical codes are an epiphenomenon of our moral sense, not vice versa. The religionists say that morality is handed down from a deity above; secularists think that it, and indeed the very attributes of that deity himself, bubble up from below. Children raised without belief in divine revelation can be as faithful to a society’s values as those who think that the Ten Commandments (at least those not concerned with religious prostration) originated with God.
As for non-believers’ purported faith “in the purity of their own reasoning,” I have no idea what Brooks is talking about. The new atheists are not on an intellectual purity crusade; they see the whole of human thought as evidence of the richness of the human mind. They embrace the gorgeousness and grandeur of music, art, and literature as a source of meaning and wisdom.
Brooks appears to want to unite neuroscience and evolutionary psychology with staunch support of religion as a precondition to decent society. I’m not sure that this balancing act will hold, but we’ll have to wait and see.
The Templeton Foundation discussion that spurred Brooks’s column is here. Readers can judge for themselves whether secularists should feel rebuked by its contents.
If morality is merely instinctual-a product of our most basic natural desires–then it is not rational at all. This is not a difficult point, but does require in upwards of 20 minutes of reading. On this, start with Socrates. Or the contemporary layman’s version, C.S. Lewis.
The “theocon” position is that morality is rooted in the universal natural moral law, knowable through human reason.
By way of contrast, Ms. Macdonald’s position is that morality is an epiphenomenon of our biological hardwiring. (Although earlier she quoted Marx that human meaning and value is *imposed* on the world. So I can’t quite keep her arguments straight.)
I’m left wondering: Who’s irrational here?
Rich said:
“The “theocon” position is that morality is rooted in the universal natural moral law, knowable through human reason.”
Exactly, although the ridiculous caricature of this position (repeated above by Ms. MacDonald) is that we only know right from wrong by reading it in the Bible. I’ve read Dawkins argue at great length how ridiculous it is to assert that we couldn’t know murder to be wrong without the 10 commandments. Which no theist worth his salt would argue with! cf. St. Paul on the law written in our hearts, and all that.
If readers would like to judge for themselves a more accurate account of the “theocon” position vis a vis reason, morality, and Revelation, they may find one here.
Incidentally, I find Brooks’ argument to be equally daft. Science, by definition and necessity, has absolutely nothing to say about morality. This is not a religious position: Aristotle knew it. So, even if we had a completely exhaustive map of the universe and the workings of the human mind, the essential questions of morality (etc) would be left untouched. This is an important point in these arguments, and I often don’t see evidence that Ms. Macdonald fully grasps it. I don’t doubt that her IQ dwarfs mine; but outstanding intelligence does not make up for familiarity in the history of philosophy and religion.
Rich:
It seems to me that science has a great deal to say about it. If I methodically study the evolutionary dynamics of co-operating groups of some social animal, what am I studying but the foundations of morality? And if, a generation or two from now, one of my student’s student’s maps the neural pathways that lead to us exhibiting, or appreciating, this behavior in preference to that behavior, would he not have uncovered some new truths about morality?
Morality is not some kind of stuff in the world, like dark matter. It’s behaviors, and common attitudes to behaviors. Why should not scientists study these things and turn up new understandings? Was Aristotle the last word on everything?
Brooks: “[Scientists who study morality] are good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central.”
Emotions are just mechanisms which induce or modify behavior, and absent behavior they’re not important. Nothing mysterious there.
Rich: “By way of contrast, Ms. Macdonald’s position is that morality is an epiphenomenon of our biological hardwiring. (Although earlier she quoted Marx that human meaning and value is *imposed* on the world. So I can’t quite keep her arguments straight.)”
You misquote: she said “Religious ethical codes (not “morality”) are an epiphenomenon of our moral sense, not vice versa.” Behaviors are the result of the hard-wiring, and the “codes” are descriptions of (some of) those behaviors. As for “human meaning and value are imposed on the world,” consider emotive reactions to potential food: food that looks, smells and tastes good causes pleasant emotions which induce you to eat the food; food that smells rotten and tastes bad induces negative emotions (disgust) which induce you to avoid the food. From a human standpoint the first is “good” and the second is “bad,” but the bacteria and molds which made the food unpalatable to humans, so they could ingest it instead, would no doubt disagree.
I welcome a discussion with Bradlaugh, since his mistake is (on my view) much-repeated and easily correctable.
Morality is practical reasoning about free human behavior. We act intelligently for perceived ends. Almost always we are presented with the option of selecting between any number of different goods/end. Some of these are better and worse, some of them are all differently good, but irreducibly different. What can science do in this situation? Nothing much. It can tell us about the natural processes that accompany our perceptions of various ‘goods.’ But those goods are perceived as being good for rational reasons, and we must nevertheless still *reason about those ends.* Ethics is concerned with the question: What shall I do? How shall I live? What is the good life? Science is permanently unable to even understand those questions.
Bradlaugh: “If I methodically study the evolutionary dynamics of co-operating groups of some social animal, what am I studying but the foundations of morality?”
You’re studying behavior, but whether you label it “morality” or “immorality” (or neither) is a value judgment based on how closely the behavior matches what we would already call “good” or “bad” behavior in a human society.
#5: In my opinion, you are vastly over-estimating the role of reason in human affairs.
#6: I think I’ll go with “neither.” And as a matter of fact, to the best of my recollection, I do. I don’t use the word “morality” except in discussions like this, and don’t think of it as other than a social arrangement. When I tell one of my kids: “Don’t do that, it’s wrong,” so far as I am aware, my meaning is: “If you do things like that, you’ll have a screwed-up life.” Is there something more I should be thinking? What? Something in Aristotle?
Dear Bradlaugh,
Indeed, one could bite the bullet and conclude that we are impelled by instincts or desires in such a way that makes practical reasoning about morality impossible. In each case (on your view) we simply act-out a set of predetermined behaviors. As you rightly suggest, this would mean that there is no such thing as “morality,” strictly speaking.
I’ll try to make this simpler if I can: does reason have anything to say about morality or religion? If no, then an odd consequence follows: I have no reason to listen to anything you have to say on the matter, since it could not possibly be “true.” If yes, then you have just sawed off the limb on which you are sitting.
Now, it seems clear to me that you do think that we can reason about these things: the proof is that you discuss, debate and write about them all the time.
Rich: You are confusing two things: (1) reasoning about the semantic content of the word “morality” (me: pointless, and not what we’re doing here), and (2) reasoning about whether the word has any semantic content (me: no, but that’s what we’re discussing).
Bradlaugh:
I now see that you are willing to bite the bullet on this; you’re arguing that “morality” does not refer to much of anything. It is a label we affix to things that have no moral content at all.
On my view, this is not even coherent. It is incoherent in the same way it is incoherent to say, “There is no truth of the matter” or “Truth is incapable of being known” or “There is no such thing as the Good.” In all these cases, the arguer implicitly presumes all sorts of knowledge about the matter at hand; ie., the denial only makes sense against the background of what one is (irrationally) trying to deny. Philosophy–at its best–helps us to understand what those implicit presuppositions in our thinking ARE, and helps us to reflect on them so that we might make them more rational.
The fact that you’ve taken the time to correct me disproves your entire argument!
Rich: I don’t even understand what you just said.
The first is often the case, e.g. with meaningless statements (“virtue is green”). The second I suspect is sometimes the case, though I’m all for trying. The third I agree with.
So I don’t really see what you’re doing with these propositions.
Frankly, I think most philosophy is bollocks.
Bradlaugh:
I will take the blame for being less than clear.
I’m happy to stick with the third line of inquiry. You candidly state that “There is no such thing as the Good.”
My argument was merely to point out that this cannot be coherently denied.
More on this later….
Bradlaugh said:
“I don’t use the word “morality” except in discussions like this, and don’t think of it as other than a social arrangement. When I tell one of my kids: “Don’t do that, it’s wrong,” so far as I am aware, my meaning is: “If you do things like that, you’ll have a screwed-up life.” Is there something more I should be thinking? What? Something in Aristotle?”
What’s bad about having a screwed up life? You’re assuming there that there’s such a thing as a good life and a bad life, but you are also asserting to Rich that there is no such thing as good and bad in any transcendent sense when it comes to choices humans make. But doesn’t leading a good life or a bad life, at least in large part, boil down to consequences of choices that we make?
Incidentally, you made this same mistake in your review of Party of Death: “If, from the principles of Natural Law, it ineluctably follows that women who discover that they are bearing Down Syndrome fetuses should not be allowed to abort those fetuses, then I can assure Ramesh Ponnuru that Natural Law principles will be tossed out of the window by every juridical authority in the land, so long as we remain a democracy. And that is as it should be.”
Should be? Why, that sounds very much like a value judgment based upon your reasoned assessment of the moral dilemma at hand – but you’re denying the very possibility of such a thing. Please correct me where I’m wrong.
I should add, incidentally, that I think this error of Bradlaugh’s is more than a little involved in his atheism, and is a consequence of attempting a Darwinian explanation of the human impulse to make moral judgments.
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Those who are personally invested in the idea that Reason, Morality, and Religion somehow do not admit of naturalistic analysis are the most threatened / disturbed when such analyses begin to bear fruit, and thus begin to put the old-fashioned, top-down understanding these things in a musty, antiquated light.
Naturalistic analyses of things like reason, religion, and morality are indeed bearing fruit. And this is indeed threatening to the old-guard, as their deeply-held convictions slowly roll along the road towards obsolescence.
But it had always been thus, as the light of scientific understanding clears out the cobwebs and darkness of superstition, wishful-thinking, and truth-by-authority.
It used to be thought that our moral-compass was somehow tied to a particular astronomical model (geocentrism). Nowadays, we’ve all given up the ghost of perfect spheres and celestial mechanics, but the urge to tie our moral-compass to a particular biological model (species-statism) is still widely felt in many quarters.
The next frontier – even among some of those who understand that species-dynamism does not threaten the moral order – is the urge to tie our moral-compass to non-naturalistic accounts of things like reason and religion, in the misguided hope that somehow stomping ones feet and closing one’s ears will somehow render the world as other than it is.
@Rich
Um… no. There are no real phenomena that science can say nothing about. At most, there are things that a society might not have the technological means to observe and study, but that has nothing to do with the capacities of science as a methodology.
What is bizarre is that you all are defending positions which none of our leading secular philosophers would defend. To hear many of you, it’s as if Logical Positivism was still respectable. Newsflash: it’s dead, and merely of historical interest. Mandatory reading: Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Your arguments are so old I’ve forgotten the answers.
Now, none of this means religious explanations are regnant–they aren’t. Just that the kind of naturalism being discussed here would embarrass most otherwise anti-religious philosophers.
Rich: Forty-three years ago about now, I was trekking across north London to study “Foundations” (i.e. of mathematics) with prof. Kneebone (actually his name — brilliant man) at Bedford College. I loved the subject. Paul Cohen had recently proved his great results in set theory, which fascinated me.
Then, and ever since, any time I’m among working mathematicians, I try to get a conversation going about foundations. I never can. They just want to do math. Most mathematicians operate from a Platonism so cheerily naive it would embarrass philosophy undergrads, never mind their professors. Yet the math gets done.
Same science. Empiricism, positivism, instrumentalism, vindication and verification (yes, I’ve got the Teaching Company course — recommended) … it’s all pretty interesting; but those pesky scientists will go on turning up results sans philosophy, just as mathematicians who couldn’t put the umlaut on the right vowel in “Gödel” will go on churning out theorems. Philosophy makes nothing happen. Most of it is crap.
Bradlaugh:
I would certainly agree that scientific practice presumes a sort of Platonism about truth. Indeed, as Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’ suggests, it can’t get along without such an intuition. But back to your remarks:
Why is science “working”? What ends is its serving such that it is (dare I say) good? Is it because scientific knowledge is desirable in itself? Or perhaps because it supports other human endeavors like, say, the relief of man’s estate? But, see, to answer *those* questions is to raise philosophical questions. You can’t get avoid them, since your argument relies upon answers to those questions whether you are aware of it or not.
For the record: I’m not interested in converting anybody here to my religious worldview. I’m only interested in trying to show that the website’s unofficial understanding of secular inquiry is no more rational–and may be much more irrational–than the sort of inquiry found in Jewish and Christian thought.
Caledonian:
You strongly suggest science has something to say about morality. So I will toss a big, slow softball: Is slavery wrong? Your response cannot exceed the boundaries of the natural sciences. No smuggling in loaded concepts or terms. Pure, hard science. Seriously, if you can pull this off you belong on Harvard’s philosophy department ASAP.
I’m confident that science will generate more and more data to support or refute hypotheses about human behavior, but it can never support or refute normative statements since they lack an empirical referent.
>>[Science] can never support or refute normative statements.<<
Thank you. One of the reasons the natural sciences are so good at what they do is that they are confined to such narrow methodological limits.
If we could all agree on this, we could proceed intelligently.
Sorry to go off-theme, here, but I was two comments in and LMAO. The discussion here on the right is of where morality originates, and what informs the secular conservative on moral issues, while the discussion on the left swings between “is Bush Hitler reincarnated?” and “what argument can their be against hedonism?”
Rich, I think part of issue is that some are assuming the meaningless-ness of value statements (except as something like expressions of preference) and are interpreting you in that light. When you say “science can tell us nothing about morality”, you mean “science can’t tell us what we ought to value”, but they read “science can’t tell us how morality operates, psychologically, or about how moral systems function”.
But as has been noted, they don’t get entirely away from ‘oughts’. They value things, but they aren’t very troubled by the possibility that they value the ‘wrong’ things, and, insofar as they care about the sources of values at all, they care about physical causes of values.
There’s at least some justification for this, I think. As Bradlaugh said, these kinds of concerns never seem to lead to much of anything. Nobody’s ever upended their value system because of a reasoned argument. Perhaps you should understand the position not as “it’s silly to value things” but as “it’s silly to talk about valuing things”. The “Party of Death” review quote isn’t contradictory if you understand that what he finds absurd is the -argument- that abortion is objectively wrong. The “this is as it should be” isn’t meant to convince anybody – it’s just there to express a personal conviction.
>>Nobody’s ever upended their value system because of a reasoned argument. Perhaps you should understand the position not as “it’s silly to value things” but as “it’s silly to talk about valuing things”.<<
I want to that Gotchaye for some helpful comments. The above passage does seem to capture the spirit of Braudlaugh’s “arguments,” which I’m afraid are raw assertions. What is freely asserted, may be freely denied.
Let me suggest something else. The quoted passage above isolates what, in many ways, was the founding discussion of Western culture. Can we reason together about the good life? Can we talk about the Good, justice and virtue and make progress? Or are we armies clashing in the night?
Culture began and only continues on the assumption that we say No to the last question. While they would be insulted to hear this, Ms. Macdonald and Bradlaugh are, so far as I can tell, on the of the Sophists of every time and age. This makes them unwitting enemies of the West (how was that for apocalyptic?).
“…on the SIDE of the Sophists…”
I don’t watch a lot of television, but somehow I manage to come across David Brooks at least once a week. For years now my response has been the same and goes something like, “Not this guy again, what a waste of air.”. In the hours upon hours of Brooks footage I’ve watched, I’ve never once heard him say anything insightful.
“To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy” -David Brooks
“To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy”
Aquinas would largely agree. Kant would in part disagree.
Somehow including David Brooks’ or one “Steel Phoenix’s” know-it-all one-liners seems silly by comparison.
On the historical evidence, I’d say the answer is a clear “no.” It’s true that such things as public torture of criminals, chattel slavery, and so on, are now no longer practiced in civilized nations. This came with a general softening of manners, though, and that came with changes in living standards, as Orwell pointed out somewhere. It didn’t come because of learned men disputing. Intellectuals always over-estimate the consequences of intellectualizing.
Nobody in the ancient world — which was very civilized, in patches — thought there was anything wrong with those things; and even as recent a Western man as James Boswell couldn’t see any problem with them; he sniggered at Dr. Johnson’s objections to slavery.
And our progress is fragile: a mere lifetime ago, in the most (by general agreement, I think) civilized nation of the West, it all went out the window.
If you wanted me to list enemies of the West, I’d lead off with those promoting the massive demographic changes we are undergoing via the importation of huge, unassimilable, low-human-capital Third World populations. The Christian churches are well to the fore in that.
Thanks for your response, Bradlaugh.
But as any reader of your post can see, you clearly invoke all sorts of moral distinctions that go well-beyond the realm of natural science. You use words like “progress” and “civilized” and “wrong.” And, what is more, it’s obvious that you think we can reason together about these matters, as this exchange evidences.
Heather,
Just wanted to add that Rich and others are correct about the Christian view of morality (and that Dawkins and others consistent misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent the point). If it’s not too much of an imposition, read Romans 2. The Christian view is that the “innate” moral sense is innate because God gave it to each person. We can indeed build on and reinforce that sense as parents. However (again from scripture) we can also “sear the conscience” to the point that our innate moral compass no longer points North. All of this fits well with my own experience of human behavior.
Very well-said, Gotchaye.
I’ve read Hume (our Hume) in other contexts where he says something to the effect that the Naturalistic Fallacy is “not really a fallacy”. I would love to hear Hume expand on this point (if I have not misread him), because I think it would speak to much of the sort of reservations that Bradlaugh, myself, Caldonian and perhaps Gotchaye have regarding what I’m reading as the top-down approach advocated by (perhaps even insisted upon) by Rich.
Rich – For my part, I am aware of Quine and his achievements, respect them, and am not trying to resurrect Positivism. I understand its limitations. But I get the sense that you would advocate, if not an outright Platonism, at least a Kant-like assertion of some sort of “noemenal” reality or essence in which the source of Reason, Morality (possibly even Aesthetics) would inhere.
It is precisely that sort of inference…let’s call it (I):
(I) Since the scientific method (as such), cannot account for normativity due to the is-ought problem, then THEREFORE there MUST exist……..to underpin my/our intuitions about those things.
…it is precisely that sort of inference that I and many others find objectionable. We find this objectionable largely because we reject the principle of sufficient reason. We reject the principle of sufficient reason because it has lead to so many conclusions which have been falsified empirically. (E.g., belief in the existence of the “ether” as a result of Aristotle’s claim that nature MUST abhor a vacuum. The Michelson-Morely experiment famously and decisively shut that idea down, as I’m guessing you’re aware.)
Sorry,
(I): Since the scientific method (as such), cannot account for normativity due to the is-ought problem, then THEREFORE there MUST exist….insert raw factual assertion….to underpin my/our intuitions about those things.
Philosophy makes nothing happen. Most of it is crap.
You have made it repeatedly clear that you are happily and entirely ignorant of philosophy. So one is forced to ask why you insist on philosophizing anyway.
Really, this is why I am so often ashamed to be an atheist. Hearing people who are ostensibly my allies defending such doctrines as positivism, which, in philosophy, has not a single living defender, just causes me to despair. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.
The irony of the atheist (or physicalist) position is that it makes the concept of “reason” itself meaningless. That is, if morality is an epiphenomena, based on brain states, neurological processes, etc. then so is all other thought or “choice” including reason itself. In which case, you did not choose to follow “reason” or “logic” any more than a theist chose to follow a holy book. The neurons just fired differently based on the laws of physics and the differing environment in your brain vs. another.
Without something outside the physical, all our decisions are simply epiphenomena, the result of physical laws we cannot escape or choose to follow. We can no more be “convinced” by reason than a raindrop can be “convinced” which side of the roof it should slide down in storm, and neither are we “responsible” for the thoughts that we have.
“Skeptics respond that moral behavior is instinctual, that parents build on a child’s initial impulses of empathy and fairness and reinforce those impulses with habit and authority. Religious ethical codes are an epiphenomenon of our moral sense, not vice versa. The religionists say that morality is handed down from a deity above; secularists think that it, and indeed the very attributes of that deity himself, bubble up from below.”
Two problems. First:
You’re right that children have to be encouraged in order for them to become truly moral. But you’re begging the question of how our primordial parents were instructed in morality. Those parents were themselves children at one time; who “built” upon them? Their parents? But their parents were also children at one time. Given that morality must be built out of empathetic instincts, who first posited the idea that it *should* be built out of empathetic instincts, or that it should be built at all?
It seems to me that the only way for you to be correct is if morality was more nakedly apparent, its instinctiveness more strongly felt, its goodness more obviously attractive, and it’s existence less in need of instruction and encouragement, at some point in our primordial ancestors than it is in us today. Somebody somewhere had to do the moral thing as such, and believe in it as such, without instruction. The superiority of this instinct had to self-originate in somebody as a thing self-evident and without need of instruction. In fact, in quite a staggering number of somebodies (which, quite frankly, seems highly unlikely). And I think we can all agree that saying that our ancestors were more immediately moral than us is absurd, from the evolutionary point of view, no? Or are you really positing a self-compelling sense of morality somewhere in the origins of mankind? We see no such self-compulsion today; we’ve inherited morality. How could our ancestors have had a more direct, less inherited, grasp of morality than we do? If they did, doesn’t that mean that morality naturally declines, not increases, over time? Before, some of us saw it as obviously good; now, we must build on its remnants relying on instruction and authority; sooner or later, we will lose our grasp on it forever.
Second:
A) If you say that morality and religion are both instincts, you have effectively equated them.
B) If you measure their value by how strongly they are felt, it seems pretty clear to me that the religious instinct was far more often felt and far more strongly felt throughout history than empathy. You say man should obey his instincts; I say, he has. His instincts tell him to be religious rather than empathetic (insofar as there is a divergence).
C) Since apparently you are not satisfied either with equating them or with simply letting mankind obey its instincts, then you measure their value by which instinct “ought” to be obeyed. In other words, you’re sneaking in a moral value system that is trans-instinctual, which has two problems: 1) we can no longer say with certainty that morality and religion are or were always instinctual; if we have access to this “higher-than-instinctual” system of values that tells us which instincts are more valuable than others, we must assume, for the sake of consistency, that so did everyone else in history. 2) If you really do believe in this trans-instinctual value system (as apparently you do), where did you get it? If it only came from the same place as morality and religion (the conclusion of evolutionary theory and atheism), on what grounds are we to apply to it over and above our other instincts, be they religious or anti-religious, moral or anti-moral? Empathy being no more than another instinct, on what grounds do we elevate it above others?
I suppose the obvious question is, can you present an evolutionary system of values that does not presuppose the Good (or “oughtness” or morality), but rather treats it as one instinct among many?
For whatever it’s wroth, btw, the most compelling argument that morality can NOT in fact be instinctual was made in a handy little book called The Abolition of Man. Atheists ignore the fact that it was written by C. S. Lewis and see if you can still come up with a non-metaphysical, instinctual grounding for “ought-ness” after reading it (should take maybe two hours or so).
Vern
Without something outside the physical, all our decisions are simply epiphenomena, the result of physical laws we cannot escape or choose to follow. We can no more be “convinced” by reason than a raindrop can be “convinced” which side of the roof it should slide down in storm, and neither are we “responsible” for the thoughts that we have.
All right.
So let’s just bet which party (reason or lunacy) will survive the longest in the upcoming geological times.
This is the Darwinian test, maladaptive features relative to current environment gets wiped out.
I am just hoping that any kind of “Armageddon” will not clear out the whole scene.
Tobias
But you’re begging the question of how our primordial parents were instructed in morality. Those parents were themselves children at one time; who “built” upon them? Their parents? But their parents were also children at one time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know that religionists do not understand the basic principles of evolution and the gradual built up of complexity.
No surprises here, dumb is as dumb as dumb can get.
Science answers the what. Religion answers the why.
@
Kevembuangga
Unsupported ad hominems aren’t exactly at the top of the intellectual food chain, either, but that doesn’t seem to stop people from presenting them as the counterpoint par excellence. Do you have an actual argument?
Heather implied an infinite regression where we all know the regression to be finite (from the evolutionary perspective). No matter how complex we are, and no matter how gradual the increasing complexity, morality had to start from somewhere. If it is instinctive, the only way we can choose it over other instincts is by having access to a set of standards that are trans-instinctual. If it is taught, then there must have been some organism or organisms in or near the beginning of moral awakening who did not need to be taught. Thus, morality was plainer to them than to us. Thus, we may safely conclude that the more morality needs to be taught, the more it is in decline. Thus, morality is being evolved out of our instincts.
This is mistaken. We do not “choose” some instinct over other instincts. Rather, in the distant past, members of a population exhibited variance with regard to their behaviors (some of which we might, in retrospect, call proto-moral behavior or something like that). Certain sorts of behaviors were more fruitful than others, and the genes involved with those behaviors, however tangentially, had a higher frequency in the next generation.
You assume the very thing you are trying to show when you preface your assertions with phrases like “the only way”, or “there must have been”. It is a form of inference-from-explanation, or abduction. Abduction, on its own, in a notoriously poor way of reasoning, and prone all sorts of philosophical blunders (e.g. Anselm’s ontological argument – which even Kant saw was question-begging.)
Abductive reasoning is only helpful in conjunction with empirical evidence, which seems to be eschewed by the “science has nothing to say” side of this debate.
A-Bax,
For the record, Aquinas saw the problems with the ontological argument as well. You are also committing the same error you accuse Tobias of; namely, you assume there must be a Darwinian explanation for our impulse to make moral judgments, and then you go about explaining the mechanism by which that would have occurred.
Such an explanation (e.g. “morality boils down to genes”) is also subject to the problems pointed out by Vern above:
“That is, if morality is an epiphenomena, based on brain states, neurological processes, etc. then so is all other thought or “choice” including reason itself. In which case, you did not choose to follow “reason” or “logic” any more than a theist chose to follow a holy book. The neurons just fired differently based on the laws of physics and the differing environment in your brain vs. another.
Without something outside the physical, all our decisions are simply epiphenomena, the result of physical laws we cannot escape or choose to follow. We can no more be “convinced” by reason than a raindrop can be “convinced” which side of the roof it should slide down in storm, and neither are we “responsible” for the thoughts that we have.”
Tobias
Unsupported ad hominems aren’t exactly at the top of the intellectual food chain, either, but that doesn’t seem to stop people from presenting them as the counterpoint par excellence. Do you have an actual argument?
So you think that religitards deserve more than ad hominems?
Counter arguments to your nonsenses are all over the place since a long time now and yet none of the religitards seem to grasp any.
BTW, the “actual argument” is that complexity doesn’t need to be designed to come by, even less so to be directed by goals or intentions.
ANY iterated function system necessarily builds up complexity over time due to the attractors it is likely to contain, and an iterated function system isn’t a mysterious mathematical monster it is any process which keeps rehashing all or part of its own output, it just consumes some ressources (energy) to keep repeating.
To apply this to morality, full blown morality (as WE know it today) didn’t came up from one day to the next, it EVOLVED like any other complex systems in the middle of which we live today.
The only “purpose” of morality it to enhance the survival of the groups who happen to have some “well working” morality, period.
Though, there is no reason that there should be only one true morality.
“What is bizarre is that you all are defending positions which none of our leading secular philosophers would defend.”
No, what’s bizarre is that you’re concerned about what the least-effective seekers of truth in all history think and say.
Your constant reference to arguments and positions that an intelligent and moderately-educated child would see through would be bizarre, but it happens so often we’ve grown used to it.
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And there has been plenty of time for many things to evolve…
@Rich
Define ‘wrong’.
I know what it means in contexts of math and physics. I know what it means in lots of systems that try to take an impersonal, objective view of the universe. Are you asking in terms of those perspectives, or are you checking to see whether I’ll conform or break with my society’s moral conventions?
A physicist can weigh in on whether it’s correct to spell ‘weigh’ as w-e-i-g-h. And what physics has to say on the matter is that the universe doesn’t care; spelling is not something that is non-trivially restrained by physical law.
Biologists, psychologists, and sociologists all study different aspects of societies. They could speak at length about the many ways societies could relate to and use (or refuse to use) slaves. They could even discuss how societal structures and espoused values could be logically compatible or incompatible with slavery.
What sense of ‘wrong’ are you asking about?
What he means by ‘wrong’ is rather obvious, Caledonian. He was clearly asking about whether or not slavery is morally permissible, evil, laudatory, etc.
It’s possible to grandstand by demanding that people not use moral language unless they can define their words in a-moral terms, but this is absurd. Before people understood anything about the nature of light, they were sensibly talking about things appearing ‘blue’. The word ‘blue’ to this day references an irreducible property of a cognitive object (though it can now be noted that -most- cognitive objects that we call ‘blue’ are causally linked to light of a certain wavelength entering our eyes). There are people (the blind and some of the color-blind) who have no real idea what ‘blue’ is, but they don’t doubt that others are saying something meaningful when they say that “the sky is blue” or even “I dreamed about a blue triangle”.
The same is true for moral language. We have a way of thinking about certain classes of things (mostly actions performed by agents) that is irreducibly normative. Sure, it’s entirely possible to -explain- where our normative classifications come from in non-normative terms, but it’s not possible to explain what is meant by our normative classifications in non-normative terms. It’s precisely like explaining ‘blue’ to the color-blind. I very much doubt that anyone, save perhaps a few sociopaths, is actually moral-blind in this sense (though, to be clear, the moral-blind are still not rational in denying that the moral language used by others lacks meaning). Instead, I think some find it convenient to deny all meaning to moral claims because of other metaphysical commitments. This is the problem with positivism. That’s not to say that a similar position isn’t tenable – error theory and the like get you pretty much all of the same practical conclusions – but you can’t just say that “slavery is evil” is word salad because there’s no agreed-upon empirical test for ‘evil-ness’.